Audio: Just a Spoonful of America The title of our show, “Just a Spoonful of America – Prescribing American Studies to Fight Fascism,” might be more than a little ironic given that fascism currently stands astride the planet once again. Perhaps our music tonight would offer a better chance at a cure. It comes from […]

AUDIO: Luis Buñuel’s The Young One: Anatomy of White Male Supremacy We open with the jazz tune, “Epistrophy,” from Eric Dolphy’s Last Date recorded in Holland in 1964. Epistrophe, from the Greek, means “a turning about” – and applied to The Young One, a constant shift of moral perspective with no settled view. As with our recent show […]

AUDIO: What Bullets do to Bodies and Lives This is the special 90-minute finale for our series A Targeted Divide. It’s called “What Bullets do to Bodies and Lives: Structural Violence, Firearms, and Surviving Gunshot Wounds.” We know a lot about gun homicide, much less about what life is like for the wounded living: What […]

AUDIO: Crime, Decline, and the Rise of the Citizen Protector For our second show in our three-part series, A Targeted Divide, we bring you “Crime, Decline, and the Rise of the Citizen-Protector: How the Meaning of Citizenship Is Changing in a Nation Awash in Firearms.” In response to economic decline and reductions in services provided […]

AUDIO: Gunning Down the Bill of Rights Today we begin a series of three programs on Guns in the USA we’re calling a A Targeted Divide. Our first show is “Gunning Down the Bill of Rights,” how the 2nd Amendment trumps the 1st. After a Supreme Court decision in 2008, the most ambiguous and poorly […]

AUDIO: Undermining Zinctown We open with music composed by Sol Kaplan for the film Salt of the Earth. Kaplan was blacklisted in the 1950s for being “uncooperative” to HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. The rest of our music will feature the work of other blacklisted artists and performers; Hazel Scott, Yip Harburg, Marc Blitzstein, […]

I watched American Sniper (prepping for an interview with Clint Eastwood biographer Patrick McGilligan tomorrow on Interchange) and there is a bit of “warrior philosophy” to give our hero motivation near the beginning of the film; it’s about sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Well, this was cribbed for the movie (it’s not in Kyle’s autobiography according […]

(Spoiler below) Will you listen? Let us first understand whiplash as a reactive consequence of force…but one that weakens with repetition. Further on Whiplash (The Dystopian Perfection of Whiplash), the movie starring J.K. Simmons (Daniel Fletcher) and Miles Teller (Andrew Neimann). I have decided it was intended to show us how the world has gone […]

Last night on Interchange I talked with Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine about government secrecy–more specifically the secrecy of “dark budgets” and “dark operations” and “dark lords”–inherent in the National Security State. [A Power Unto Itself: Scott Horton on the National Security Elite] Horton traces the history of the meaning of “government by the people” […]

The tops were large, and were railed about with what had once been octagonal net-work, all now in sad disrepair. These tops hung overhead like three ruinous aviaries, in one of which was seen, perched, on a ratlin, a white noddy, a strange fowl, so called from its lethargic, somnambulistic character, being frequently caught by […]